It did not take someone with a deep insight into the takma mind to tell that Shyriath was having difficulty bearing up under his current circumstances.

While he found the experimentation of Einriss and Puugwol uncomfortable and sometimes painful, he rarely made efforts to resist it. And neither did he remain uncooperative in communication - indeed, he seemed increasingly inclined to talk, sometimes even civilly.

“At least your voices,” he muttered, “are real, and I know they're real. Given the others I've started hearing, it's something to hold on to. I just don't understand the particulars of these amusements I've been invited to participate in.” He lay still in his cage as Einriss prepared to attempt some biochemical alterations, the nature of which was not clear to him; it was clear that Shyriath had no idea what an “enzyme” was nor what altering the ones in his muscle fibers would do.

If it hadn't been for Puugwol's forays into esoteric uses of bilaak-tesh, Einriss might have not commented at all and simply ignored the conversation - not because he objected to conversing, but simply because it was a topic not adjacent to his interests. This way, there was at least a route back to his curiosities, and so he asked, as he worked: “How do they manifest and what are they saying?”, a small thread in his mental landscape latching onto the different ways hallucinogenic drugs could affect a body.

“People I knew once, mostly,” Shyriath replied morosely. “Old friends. Some of them speak as if they'd just met me on the street and are asking how I've been. Others are demanding to know why I'm not escaping and trying to kill Dlyss before she gets everyone else killed. One assumes,” he added bitterly, “that they can't see the shackles.”

“Is 'Evrith' one of those friends?” Puugwol interrupted. At Shyriath's sharp look, she added mildly, “you spoke her name in your sleep earlier.”

The elderly green looked away, hesistating. “A… friend, yes. In a way. Or at least we found ourselves on the same side. She was an oracle, you see. That tends to give on an advantage in being persuasive.”

At this, Einriss's interest naturally waned - Puugwol was certainly better-equipped to talk to people about imaginary voices, and if she was going to talk about it with Shyriath, all the better, and he could simply listen, instead, while focussing more on the task at hand. There was, it turned out, more to the issue of weakness in the Chosen than simple insufficient muscle mass - there was something subtly wrong about the structure of the fibres themselves, and Einriss was starting to think that, after a few false starts on prior days, he had it figured it out. A few more checks might just be all that was needed.

“You knew an oracle?” Puugwol exclaimed. She stood stock still for a moment, her color and texture shifting kaleidoscopically, and then burst out: “Did she ever any anything about species changing over time?”

Shyriath was clearly baffled at the question. “…yes?”

“And they do???”

“…apparently?”

Puugwol emitted a delighted shriek and pounced on Einriss. “Einriss did you hear that!” she bellowed into his face.

“Mmhmm,” Einriss confirmed, lightly moving his head out of the way of the shouting to protect his ears - for all the marginal good it did. “I thought the existence of the Chosen already established that,” he mused, absent-mindedly.

“Yes yes,” Puugwol replied insistently, pulling back a bit, “but I don't mean like that. We're not a different species from other takmar and we've never seen any evidence that we diverged, as such. We know non-Chosen parents produce Chosen children even when they themselves have no Chosen ancestry. We didn't diverge. But it always seemed to me that such a thing must have happened-”

She stopped, and glanced over her shoulder at the bemused Shyriath. “That is what your Oracle was talking about, yes?”

“Yes,” he replied absently, “I'm afraid so.”

“That different species are related?”

“If not all of them, then at least many of them,” he replied a bit sourly, “or so she said. I am under the impression that, given the spans of time involved, there was a limit to how far she could investigate things without devoting herself to it entirely.”

Einriss seemed to consider the notion for a while. “I suppose it's plausible,” he muttered, still mostly focussed on his task. “We do share an awful lot of biochemistry with everything else from Avishraa that moves, whereas the life local to this world seems quite different.” He was not, apparently, taking this revelation with the necessary gravity.

Puugwol nodded thoughtfully. Something seemed to occur to her, and she asked Shyriath, “Did she cite any examples to support what she said?”

“Yes,” he said, “and demonstrated it in practice. She took one of our xtauh companions as a mate, and eventually bore a daughter that was a, a hybrid.”

“A xtauh-”

“A species that lives north of the mountains, in the desert. They're small, their antennae stick sideways…”

“Oh. The ghiidan.” Puugwol considered this. She had never seen a ghiidan personally, but they were known to wander into Dunooma on occasion, usually after a bad encounter with the orghysh in the grasslands. She looked at Einriss. “I wonder if - if we only knew more about the relationships between species - it would help identify useful mechanisms that could be easily replicated in our own bodies.”

“What are you thinking about?” Einriss probed. It wasn't as though he didn't know how to manipulate a zygote into having a different genetic mark-up, after all, so that part wasn't a bottleneck that needed solving. He couldn't immediately think of something that was not better done by continued takmar-specific investigations.

“Well, it is always useful to have examples to work from rather than having to work from first principles,” Puugwol insisted. “The more closely an organism is related and the more different its adaptations, the better the chance that those adaptations could be transferred with minimal effort.”

Einriss paused for a moment, still not quite adopting what Puugwol might consider the correct level of enthusiasm for the revelation, but evidently more willing to engage with it now. “Well, yes,” he said, finally, his tone contemplative. “But that was part of what I was doing in my previous line of work already, though I grant I couldn't have explained it to you in those terms before.

“It's quite clear some things are more… compatible with each other than others - for grafts, for example. Something about the way the biochemistry sings. Some things are an octave or more apart, others just one note or less.”

The shifter considered this, tail lashing. “If I had understood this properly before, I feel that I could have participated more directly in the experiments. I have said before that some kinds of shapeshifting are easier than others, and that I suspected something like this to be behind them. With a better understanding of the mechanism - and possibly more specimens to work with, particularly if they were non-Chosen, for purposes of comparison…” She stamped a foot irritably. “Why could Dlyss not have confirmed this when I asked her about it?”

“Some things are meant to be obscured,” replied Dlyss.

Although none of those present in the laboratory had seen her cross from the door to her current spot, there she nonetheless was, sitting primly. She regarded them coolly, occasionally turning her gaze on Shyriath, who shrank back against the wall of his cage.

“That's not a very useful outlook for scientific advancement,” Einriss commented, but without much emotion to the comment - it was, at best, a faint dusting of disappointment or confusion across something that was clearly more of a statement of fact to him. By tone, it could just as well be ignored; it was not even a challenge. He seemed only mildly bewildered by Dlyss's presence and, taking that the conversation was likely to be between Dlyss and Puugwol, resumed his focus on his task.

“I suppose it would not be,” Dlyss replied placidly, “but the cosmic order is not concerned with its suitability for scientific advancement.” She stood up and padded toward the cage.

Puugwol aimed an unfriendly glare at Dlyss. “This Evrith of which Shyriath spoke did not seem to find the matter 'obscured'.”

Dlyss paused; there was a somewhat thoughtful look on her face, which by and large failed to convey the Oracle's temptation to create a spatiotemporal anomaly in the middle of Puugwol's head. At length, she replied, “My predecessor, whatever her other qualities, was not a particularly stable personality. Her judgment was… flawed.”

Shyriath, though clearly afraid, looked as if he might respond to this, but he shut his mouth when Dlyss turned her gaze back on him. But this was evidently not enough to dispel her attention; she resumed her walk toward the cage. Without a word, without a gesture, two circles opened in the air: one directly in front of Dlyss, and one inside the cage, and without pausing the Oracle walked through the one and into the other and pinned Shyriath to the wall with one forepaw.

As the breath whooshed out of his chest, she murmured softly to him, “I do not appreciate your interference.”

I don't appreciate your interference, either, a part of Einriss quipped grumpily at the disruption, but the whole thing had rather startled him enough that he stood frozen and quiet, watching the one-sided altercation with something between alarm and rapt fascination. She hadn't done that around him before, and a part of him automatically wondered if that kind of teleportation might be useful to their project at some point, though in his flustered state it simply circled around in isolated agitation, puttering aimlessly, finding nothing.